Green Giants
Being short, I’m sensitive to things that tower over me, and lately I’ve noticed something: Garden plants are getting taller. This is partly because of laissez-faire gardening around my house: Plant a Gertrude Jekyll rose, look away for a couple of years and it’s on the roof. Aside from that, a lot of us with dinky city lots are tired of planting what fits. We don’t want dwarf cannas or compact lavenders or other low-growing greens that nurseries carry to suit our scale. We yearn for rampaging bamboo. A rattling jungle of elephant’s ears.
A friend of mine calls these “NBA plants” because they’re more than six feet tall and make leafy neighbors look like midgets. This same guy--himself of NBA height--is wild for castor beans, which reach eight graceful, poetic feet and produce seeds that can kill you. Here’s where power begins to shift from the gardener to the gardened.
Leon Whiteson, who wrote the 1995 book “A Garden Story,” explains it this way: “You can look at a landscape as something to control and view commandingly from a distance, or you can launch yourself into its heart and let whatever happens happen.”
In a garden of overwhelmingly huge plants, which he has, you don’t really have a choice. His abutilons are 10 feet high; his pencilbush climbs to 25. There are no commanding views--only eye-to-leaf level, canopy level and sky. At each step on Whiteson’s paths, it’s just you and the plants--so close that they’re breathing on you, not to mention telling you where to look and where to go.
So much more than the sum of its parts, a garden like this has a primeval charge; its thickets promise both comfort and danger. As landscape architect Heide Baldwin suggests hopefully: “There might be some big monkey in there.” Baldwin lives with her nurseryman husband, Randy, in the shadow of 20-foot-tall cordylines, sky-high flaxes, bamboos and grasses. She says she’s “relieved” by their unbridled garden after seeing all the quiet, formal borders in the world: “When a garden’s too clipped and perfect, my chest tightens up.”
Some people, of course, get jumpy when a plant grows bigger than they are. And there’s a line between tall and too tall. “It’s when you can’t see out your windows,” says Randy Baldwin, general manager of Santa Barbara’s San Marcos Growers, a wholesale nursery, where he and Heide live. Twelve years in the making, his personal plant collection now requires pruning with a chain saw.
“Things can grow especially large in Southern California,” says Jan Smithen, who teaches gardening classes at the L.A. Arboretum in Arcadia. “It’s good to find out how large before you put them in,” Smithen advises. “If you use them right, tall plants can have as much presence as a person.” Her favorite green giants include tower of jewels (Echium wildpretii), which launches a 10-foot-tall spire of blooms before dying in its second year, and salvia ‘Costa Rica Blue,’ an eight-foot monster that flowers profusely in fall.
In my last garden, I found myself increasingly looking upward--at perfumey osmanthus, whispering Mexican bamboo, raggedy box hedge. Even our rosemaries, which faced each other across a path, grew beyond me. One of my favorite routes took me back and forth between them, and their smell rubbed off on my clothes and in my hair. For the rest of the day, I carried the garden with me, along with the memory of standing to commune with something green.
